Google BERT – The Latest Discovery of Google

BERT is the acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which is the latest offering from the well esteemed Google search engine. As you might already know, Google didn’t emerge as an extremely intelligent and efficient search engine overnight. It took decades of continuous research and effort of Google engineers to constantly optimize and improvise upon their search engine algorithms that finally enabled this company to become a regular household name, all across planet earth today. In fact, no person, whether it be an amateur or a geek, can even imagine a life without the existence of Google nowadays.  However, my topic here is not regarding how Google managed to develop a unique search engine and later on out smart it’s competitors. All that is history and relevant information regarding that is already available on the internet. What I wish to talk about is regarding BERT – the new kid on the block that is predicted to catapult the Google corporate machine to even new record breaking heights.  

As you all are aware, Google’s search algorithms have always been successful to help the user to find the exact information that he actually needs without having to specify the exact search keywords or search parameters. That’s the reason why Yahoo and Hotmail were ill fated to run out of their search engine business since Google primarily itself outsmarted them in this technology. 

But even after gaining total dominance, Google hasn’t ever thought to rest on its laurels; which should be the essential trait for any company hoping to become a huge name in the corporate world. What Google did was to further find ways and means by which it can further improvise on it’s search engine mechanism. The answer to all these problems is this – BERT. 

What is BERT?

As stated earlier, BERT is a recent innovational technique of Google to achieve more accuracy and efficiency in search results placed by the user. BERT achieves this by making use of NLP (Natural Language Processing) technique. 

Though English is the most widely spoken language in the world, this language has its own complexities. The same word can have different meanings when used in a different context. Also there are words that can be used both as a noun and a verb. The same word when placed at a certain position in a sentence will have an alternate meaning when placed at a different position in the same sentence! How can a search engine understand all this ? Well this is where BERT comes to play. 

How does a BERT work?

Previously, search engine algorithms would give accurate results only when the user typed a few Google specific keywords. When the user typed long sentences or phrases, the accuracy of the results got reduced to a certain extent. It is here that BERT comes to play.  BERT helps Google search engine to understand phrases and sentences more like a human being. With BERT, Google search engine can easily decipher the nuances and context of search queries. 

BERT consists of a bidirectional Transformer encoder, that is capable to understand the contextual relations between words or phrases in a sentence. This encoder will read the text input and transforms it to a suitable prediction result. Usual directional models can only read text input sequentially. A Transformer encoder however is capable of reading the entire sequence of words instantly, hence the search engine can learn the context of a word based on the entire sentence. 

What is the role of AI in a BERT?

BERT is powered by AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms that deals with linguistics which helps computers to understand the way humans communicate. Unlike previous conventional models, the advantage of BERT lies in its ability to read an entire set of words in a sentence in a bidirectional way.

During training period, a BERT will be given billions of sentences as input. From the input, the BERT will then have to predict a random set of missing words from these sentences. After many such practice runs, the BERT will finally be able to understand how a sentence fits together grammatically. 

Advantage of using BERT?

Generally people use Google to search for information, or to navigate to a particular website. BERT can understand and interpret phrases and sentences much better than previous models, hence the Google search engine can generate results with more accuracy and precision. BERT also helps the search engine to filter out irrelevant links and choose only the right ones.. This gives search engine users more value for their time spent on the google website. Search engine users can also quickly find the information they need thanks to BERT. 

How can a BERT transform your business?

BERT helps the Google search engine to find the right information quickly, hence this will be good for businesses and firms who are looking forward to advertise their products and services. BERT will ensure that a company will be listed on top of the search engine result. BERT will increase traffic to some pages and decrease traffic to others. But the good thing is only the right pages will be listed. If a company that provides a product or a service creates a website with the right and appropriate description of the service that it offers then that website is sure to land on top of listings when a potential customer conducts a Google search. 

Future of Google and BERT

BERT was officially launched in 2018 and is still in an embryonic stage and has scope for further improvement. BERT still has miles to go in gaining more accuracy and precision. Currently Google engineers are conducting research on voice search and how to further improve its online translation both online and via Google Assistant. More future updations are expected in the future and hopefully Google search engine is set to cross more milestones and set to place new benchmarks in the field of technology.